Julia Morgan | Canada | 2020
15 min | CC Available

Nora Young is a multi-sport champion, brimming with trophies, talent and an indomitable zest for life. We meet her at age 95, and learn she was one of the greatest female athletes of the 1920s-40s, during a “golden age” when women began playing sports on a societal level for the first time. After hearing about some of her sporting accomplishments, we learn there is none quite so thrilling as the story of “Nora Young and the Six-Day Race.” 

So begins a “story within a story,” where Young breaks into the surreal world of men’s Six-Day bike racing in 1936 at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens. Borrowing men’s bikes (because women’s pro racing bikes were hard to come by back then), Nora and her competitors take off before 15,000 electrified fans, eventually developing their “track legs.” But does Nora have what it takes to beat her arch-rival in the final women’s race “on the old speed saucer”?  

Combining hand-drawn, rotoscope, digital puppet, and photo animations; narration by Sarah Slean (who also composes for the film); and interviews with Young telling her own story more than 70 years later, UNDENIABLY YOUNG finally gives a groundbreaking, nearly forgotten athletic hero her rightful place in history. 

DIRECTORS BIO

Julia Morgan

Julia Morgan is a Toronto-based documentary director, writer, editor, and producer who focuses on stories with a distinct point of view and an emphasis on emotional truth. Julia is working on two new doc projects, including a short about young people’s emotional connection to the climate crisis, which won the Best Short Pitch prize at Forest City Film Festival’s PitchFest competition. Her work on various producing teams has contributed to highly successful documentary feature films such as Driving with Selvi (associate producer), Transfixed (producer), and The Real Inglorious Bastards (recreation coordinator) – all of which have appeared in theatres and on television broadcasts worldwide and won numerous awards. Julia is an alumnus of the DOC Institute Breakthrough program for high-potential emerging producers and was one of three emerging directors selected for the 2018 RBC Yorkton Film Festival Mentorship Program.